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Brooklyn By Night

We were driving along Ocean Parkway, heading for Pomme de Terre, and she was fearful. The restaurant is located in Ditmas Park, which is a part of Flatbush, where few non-Brooklynites have ventured since the Dodgers abandoned Ebbets Field long ago.

In her 22 years of living in New York, she told me, she’d been to the borough fewer than two dozen times, mostly to visit the Brooklyn Academy of Music. In those kinds of places, the turf war is between the first and second violins.

She calmed down after we parked near a perfectly painted bistro with an irresistibly cute blue-and-yellow door, located on the corner of a tree-lined street. “Sycamores!” she exclaimed. “If we were in France, people would be playing pétanque under them.” Except we were in Flatbush, on a brutally hot Sunday evening, and kids were romping under fire-hydrant spray.

This newly opened bistro, sister restaurant to the well-regarded Farm on Adderley (located a subway stop away), was jammed, and remained that way throughout the evening. It has clearly become, in not much more than a month, one of those eating spots destined to anchor and uplift a neighborhood—not that Ditmas Park is really very scary at all.

There’s a perfectly conceived four-stool bar in the front of the dining room, although it’s not as alluring as one might wish. The gray-haired women perched there may well have been unwinding from an afternoon at Loehmann’s. “That is the unsexiest bar in New York,” another friend who joined us pointed out. The interior is bistro-cliché, right down to a tin roof and painted replicas of recognizable French posters. Still, of all the too-familiar themes in dining, almost none are more comforting than classic bistro, especially when the place promises to provide what it calls “well-loved food.”

A few of the dishes are reason enough to make the trek (on the Q train if you’re coming from Manhattan). The Steak Frites Au Poivre might be the best under-$20 beef dish in New York, and it looked to me that at least half the customers ordered it. The strip steak was thick, tender, juicy, peppery, and cooked precisely to order. When I decided it was probably a fantastic accident, getting a steak that satisfying for $19, I returned a week later and got one just as good. The dining room the second night was a study in breeziness, doors and windows thrown open to let in cool, dry air—try finding authentic oxygen in a Manhattan restaurant.

Meat dishes are particularly appealing here, even if a dry-aged ribeye, ordered very rare, came medium-well. The skin on our duck confit could have been crisper, but the meat was flawless and an accompanying smoked duck sausage more than satisfying. A croque monsieur sandwich—essentially grilled ham-and-cheese—was tasty but so overstuffed another friend described it as “Katz’s goes to Paris.” Skate was cooked exactly right, but the beefy-tasting croutons piled on top reminded me of stuffing for a Thanksgiving turkey.

The wine list is filled with obscure bottlings that I cannot fairly describe as finds, although a lighter style ‘05 Cahors ($28) was a perfect summer red. Salads are overdressed and vegetables seem basically an afterthought, although the fries, as bistro fries should be, are thin and crisp. The butter is made in-house, a terrific touch. Service isn’t particularly proficient, but it’s friendly and there’s lots of it.

I tried four desserts: an apple tart Tatin with a crust that would have gotten a French pastry chef guillotined; a rather dry chocolate mousse topped with a few grains of sea salt—swell-tasting but painfully intellectual; a warm chocolate cake with a near-melted center that reinforced my theory that very good chocolate is used here; and a lush, caramelized banana-caramel pot de crème that contends for best $5 dessert in New York.

You’ve probably figured out by now that menu prices are low. Cauliflower soup topped with olive oil and laced with crunchy shrimp must be the finest $5 soup in New York.

I asked our waiter—who assured us that his many tattoos did not denote local gang affiliation—how far we were from the sections of Flatbush not as user-friendly as Ditmas Park. He told us we need not worry, inasmuch as the worst of Flatbush was easily “a few blocks away.” My final advice for your visit to Pomme de Terre: Don’t just drive safely when returning home. Also drive in the right direction.